The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind

"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Juries and other problems

I know I shouldn’t celebrate getting out of jury
duty; the right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury of my peers is a
fundamental constitutional right and as such is certainly not something I
should shirk simply because the exercise of that right causes me some minor
inconvenience. On the other hand, jury duty is a pain in the ass that I would just
as soon skip and now I can. Technically, I am still in this week’s jury pool,
but they’ve already gone past my number and I am pretty sure this means that
this particular problem has gone the way of all flesh. Yay!!!

Thursday, October 09, 2014

Whine, whine, whine, doesn't he ever shut up?

I dislike reading the mail. At work, I solve this
problem by throwing all of it into the trash almost as soon as the clerks put
the stuff on my desk, which is an excellent system and one that I commend to
your attention but not one I can repeat at home, unfortunately. At home, I have
to worry about throwing something important away; actually, I don’t worry about
it at all, but people tell me I should and so for the sake of familial amity I let
on that I am worried when in fact I don’t really give a rat’s patoot. So
instead of throwing my mail away immediately, I avoid looking at it for as long
as I can. I don’t know why I have an aversion to my mail; when I was a boy,
getting a letter was a big deal, especially if the letter came sometime near my
birthday; I knew that there’d be some money tucked in the card inside and then I’d
get to spend more than my mother would allow me otherwise on candy. Nowadays,
of course, the mail is full of people asking me for money that I don’t want to
give them.I usually get a refund on my
income taxes, which is nice, but let’s face it, the IRS is not giving me free
money, they’re sending my money back to me. There is a difference, you know. There
are exceptions to my mail aversion, of course: I will happily crack open the National Geographic as soon as I can lay
my hands on it and I will open anything that says statement enclosed on the
front almost as soon as it arrives. However much I dislike reading my mail, I
dislike owing money even more, so I want to get rid of the bills as fast as
possible.But the National Geographic came a couple of weeks ago and I’ve already
paid the bills for this month, and therefore it was in a dispirited state of
all right, let’s get this over with that I went through the mail this weekend
and discovered something shocking.

As a person with more chronic diseases than I
know what to do with, I get a lot of mail from medical supply companies and
health insurance plans and all the attendant remora of that insatiable beast,
the American health care system. Usually, I just look at this stuff and throw
it into the trash; analog spam deserves nothing less, I think; and it was with
that intention firmly in mind that I opened a letter from the company that
supplies me with insulin and other diabetic supplies. After the usual corporate
pleasantries, the letter said that after October 30, 2014, this company would
no longer supply me with the very necessary supplies I mentioned in the
previous sentence. Well, I was stunned and shocked and amazed, with a large
dollop of fear and consternation thrown into the pot for extra flavoring. I
have dealt with this same company for ten years and I could not believe that
they were tossing me out on my metaphorical ear after all we didn’t mean to
each other. What had gone wrong with our relationship?What had I done to deserve this sort of
treatment?

I went into work the next day fully intending to
get to the bottom of the matter. I knew that I hadn’t done anything that
warranted my getting the boot, so I was going to need names and phone numbers and
web sites and the Lord only knows what else to reinstate myself in good
standing with this flighty pharmaceutical. I was already certain that some sort
of bureaucratic snafu had occurred, that some computer somewhere had had a
glitch or a virus or a nervous breakdown and had completely wiped my medical
record off the face of the earth and now some low-bore clerk was trying to
cover the mistake up by dropping my coverage and hoping I didn’t notice.Well, I was having none of that, no way no
how. I was not going to take this lying down, standing up, or even sitting in a
recliner drinking hot chocolate with the little marshmallows floating on top
while watching Vanna light up the letters on Wheel of Fortune. No, I am an experienced bureaucratic warrior and
these clowns would soon find out that they weren’t going to push me around and
get away with it. They’d be sorry they ever tangled with me, yes they would,
the scurvy louts.

Having girded my loins for battle, I entered the
fray with equal parts of high hope and stern determination, convinced as I was
of the righteousness of my cause, only to be gobsmacked by the mother of all
gobsmackery at my first contact with the trolls of the corporate bureaucracy.
It seems that yes, the company is dropping my account, and the reason why they
are dropping my account is that the company is going bankrupt.When I say they are going bankrupt, I do not
mean that they are filing for Chapter 11 so that they can reorganize the
company, restructure its debts, and then get back on its corporate feet leaner
and meaner than before; I mean they are going into liquidation, as in they are
soon to be one with the choir invisible, the silent majority, and the Norwegian
blue parrot, a remarkable bird that spends more time than
it ought to pining for the fjords. Lovely plumage, though. In
short, this company is flat on its ass.

I was stunned, first by its immediate
implications—where do I get my supplies now—and then by a growing disquiet. We
live in an age in which the media and the government describe diabetes as an
epidemic, a condition affecting more and more people than ever before. How
then, in a market where the supply of customers is growing ever larger, both
individually and in the aggregate (yes, this is a fat joke, just in case you
were wondering), and where said customers need their insulin and lancets and
alcohol swabs and glucose meters, etc. in the same way that junkies need their daily
fix, does a company with a captive and ever-growing market have so little
business sense that circumstances force it into bankruptcy? One need only look at the ever-expanding American
waistline to know that there is gold in them there lardasses and only a fool
could fail to profit from the wealth created by years of junk food and
Coca-Cola. Apparently, this company found all the fools who could fail to
profit from these circumstances and gave them positions of great corporate responsibility,
which has led to the inevitable situation the company and all of its customers
now find themselves. Well, character is destiny, the ancient Greeks believed,
and I am sure that all of the aforementioned fools will find good government
jobs where their foolishness will do as little harm as possible. They could,
for example, go to work for the Vampire State’s health insurance plan, where
those of us who need our diabetic supplies go to find out where we are
going to get our supplies now that the old supplier has gone the way of all flesh, and where they
could tell the people who run that plan that the company the plan's voice-mail keeps
referring people to has gone out of business. Finding oneself
trapped on a Mobius loop is a disagreeable experience, to say the least, and I do wish that if the state has to do business
with pharmaceuticals that they do business with a Mexican drug cartel, an organization that
clearly knows how to make money selling drugs, unlike the clods they're working with now.But that would make sense and we can’t have
any of that, can we? As Governor Lepetomane quite rightly pointed out, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen!